Robbie Collin26 November 2015 • 10:30am

Steven Spielberg conjures up a handsome and rewarding Cold War thriller

The first two things we see in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies are faces, and both of them belong to the same man. One is his reflection in a mirror, and the other is an elegant self-portrait. The man himself is sitting between them, his own face turned away from us, looking thoughtfully from one to the other, as if he’s trying to work out which side of the looking-glass he’s on.

The man is a softly spoken Russian spy called Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), who’s living in New York in 1957, at the height of the Cold War. After spending nine years undercover, everything about Abel is a mystery: throughout the film, characters refer to him variously as “your guy” and “my guy”, though it’s never really clear whose guy is whose.

From his humble apartment, Spielberg shows us Abel heading out to work in an astonishing, almost silent extended sequence, in which the only sounds are city hubbub: a distant car horn, a rumbling train, a wisp of fiddle music. He takes the subway to the river and sets down his easel at a bench by the river, underneath which is stuck a secret message for him to intercept. Abel is being tailed by FBI agents, who blend into the crowd in grey trench coats and fedoras pulled down tight. Everyone looks like a secret agent. Who knows? Perhaps they are.

As its sensational opening immediately shows, Bridge of Spies is a mature and classically handsome thriller, swirling with novelistic intrigue. At times it even feels like the great James Stewart Cold War drama that never was: think of it as a kind of Mr. Smith Goes to East Berlin, complete with a Capra-esque twinkle.

Spielberg has always seemed more of a Frank Capra than an Alfred Hitchcock: a storyteller with interests, rather than an artist with kinks. But Bridge of Spies elicits plenty of that wry, nervy tension that underpins some of the best of Hitchcock’s films – as well as those of Carol Reed and Otto Preminger, two more consummate stirrers of mid-century murk. Perhaps for that, we have to thank Joel and Ethan Coen, who, along with the British playwright Matt Charman, co-wrote the script.

Bridge of Spies is inspired by the true story of an insurance lawyer, James B. Donovan, who became the unlikely go-between in an exchange of prisoners between the U.S. and Soviet governments in 1957. Donovan (Tom Hanks), a genially greying father of three, is nominated as Abel’s defence lawyer following his capture. The first half of the film plays out like Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, with Hanks – of course – taking the James Stewart role, defending an indefensible man for the greater social good.

Donovan makes an unpopular but convincing case to have Abel imprisoned rather than executed, in case he’s ever needed as a bargaining chip. That need arises almost instantly when Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), the young pilot of the U-2 prototype spy plane, is shot down over Soviet Russia and imprisoned, while Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American economics student studying in Berlin, is captured by the paranoid East German police force. As Abel’s state-appointed representative, Donovan is sent to Berlin to negotiate some kind of trade – and against the explicit advice of the CIA, decides to pursue a two-for-one deal.

Tom Hanks, right, and Mark Rylance in a scene from Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg’s Cold War thrillerCredit:
AP/Jaap Buitendijk

The film’s title refers to the span across the Havel River between American West Berlin and Potsdam, where captured spies were habitually traded during the Cold War. But it’s also about the metaphorical bridge that Donovan has to build from a precarious combination of compromise, bluff and rhetoric, as he negotiates with various go-betweens, often under pretences both sides know to be false for the sake of saving face.

Hanks is as well-cast here as you’d expect, slipping into the role like it’s a silk dressing gown, and relishing his character’s breezy, argumentative wit and neat-continually bubbling private sense of amusement. But in pairing him with the glassy, unreadable Rylance – who’s magnificent here – Spielberg makes a deliberately uneasy mis-match that keeps the entire film on its guard. (A scene in which Abel quietly outwits an entire FBI raiding party in just his vest and underpants contains acting so understated, it’s virtually subliminal.)

When the story takes Donovan to Berlin, you rue Rylance’s absence, but the fun eventually picks back up. He bargains with Soviet and East German officials while the city works its icy voodoo. He eventually even develops a persistent sniffle to match Abel’s in New York: as the Coens no doubt observed, talk about a cold war.

Spielberg’s reliably superb cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, lends Berlin a stark and bitter beauty. (The film’s craftsmanship is impeccable, with the noticeable exception of Thomas Newman’s subdued and drizzly score.) In the moonlight, as dark cars swing through the city’s snow-dusted streets, the place looks as monochrome as the Vienna of The Third Man – a life-size chessboard on which every piece has the same shadowy hue.

“What’s the next move when you don’t know what the game is?” Abel asks Donovan during one of their encounters. But in Bridge of Spies, working out the next move is the game, and it’s one that Spielberg plays with muscular self-assurance and style.